A chronicle of the creative adventures of filmmaker Maximilian Le Cain.

Friday, December 03, 2010

December Black Sun

Another Black Sun on the horizon, this one coming up on Monday December 6th, 8 pm, in The Pavilion, Carey's Lane. Tickets €14. The live acts, curated as always by Vicky Langan, are Borbetomagus, Thomas Ankersmit and Usurper. This evening is also the culminating event in this year's Cork Art Trail.

Below are the notes for my film programme, which I've devoted entirely to the dazzling work of Stéphane Marti...

For the first time, Black Sun is devoting its entire film programme to the work of a single artist, veteran French filmmaker Stéphane Marti.

Although little known to Irish audiences, Marti has been active since the early ‘70s, creating a sumptuous yet intimate series of baroque, homoerotic cinematic gems on Super-8 that focus on the relationship between the camera and the body. His gracefully intoxicating sense of colour, rhythm, movement, composition and texture is of a force that far outstrips even the more widely recognized work of Derek Jarman.

Two of Marti’s films will be screened at the December Black Sun:Allegoria (14 mins, 1979) Dating from the first phase of Marti’s career, this “true concerto for body and camera [that] celebrates the worship of Eros” employs dance, elaborate make-up, water and body paint in its dynamically sensuous ‘ritual’.Mira Corpora (45 mins, 2004) This dazzling and hypnotic homage to Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) represents an indisputable peak in cinema’s exploration of the meeting, and melting, of light and the human body.

An exponent of the Super-8 format, Marti has been compared to a jeweller for the finesse with which he works his miniature medium. He has said:

“How cinema approaches the body is the most stimulating challenge that I know. I’ve given form and light to a filmed body / filming body repertoire which has developed thanks to the lightness of the cameras I use and to the instinctive exchanges I’ve established with my ‘actors’ in the infinite palette of relations of desire: attraction, repulsion, fear, hysteria, ecstasy, pleasure, sweetness, etc. Artifice, theatricality, lyricism always reinject energy into the game… I place the body like a jewel in its box, a precious object trapped in an enclosed space, and attack it from all sides with my camera…”